Part 10

The ground thus cleared, Hippocrates notes four points. In the first place beardlessness, and its reputed concomitants, were limited to Scythians of wealth, which he explains to be synonymous with hereditary rank; or at least were most common among these. Hippocrates, it is true, puts this down to their equestrian habit, not to a difference of race. Yet it is clear, from Herodotus’ account, that the Scythian aristocracy were the result of a quite recent irruption of a purely nomad people from beyond the Tanais, which had displaced, though not wholly, the former population of Scythia. Secondly, he observes that the Scythians in general differ wholly in physique from the rest of the peoples of Europe; but he does not on that ground raise the question of an immigrant origin. The reason for this omission, however, is clear from his third point, that the abnormality in question is such as might be predicted from a consideration of the climate and mode of life of any human inhabitants of Scythia. After this, his fourth point brings him right up to the brink of discovery, though it is not pressed to its logical conclusion by further research; for he is clear both that the beardlessness could exist without further disabilities, and also that, in addition to climate and customs conducive to this bodily habit, the Scythians were naturally inclined to be beardless. But the first of these facts he ascribes, not without professional excuse, to successful preventive treatment; and the latter was clearly regarded by him as the incipient effect of climate and the like upon persons who were congenitally normal. It is curious, meanwhile, that he does not make use of the crucial instance of the beardless Scythians at Askalon, to test his conclusion that beardlessness and the like are the effect of climate; for the climate of Askalon differs from that of Scythia in almost every important particular. It is permissible, however, to suggest that we have here one of the numerous instances in which important statements are recorded by Herodotus, which, whether true or false in themselves, failed for some reason to become assimilated by the learned world of the fourth century.

Herodotus, however, was still anything but satisfied as to the paramount value of the physical criterion of kinship. In the majority of cases it proved either too much or too little. A good instance is his comparison of the Colchians with the Egyptians. Here he bases his argument for their affinity on their common physical characters, dark skin and woolly hair. But this proves too much: there are other peoples with dark skin and woolly hair, who are certainly _not_ of Egyptian origin. On the other hand it proves too little; for what he proposes to establish here is not a general community of origin, but direct Egyptian colonization within historic times. For this proof, he prefers to rely on the evidence of a ceremonial custom which he regards as typically African; for it is both Egyptian and Aethiopian; and, as it happens to be a custom involving mutilation of the person, it belongs, as we shall see presently, to a class of observances which were regarded by Greek anthropology as competent to effect real changes of physique in course of time. The merely external evidence of a common industry, such as the linen-weaving which he adduces here, clearly stands for Herodotus on a lower plane, along with their general similarity of culture and language.

Clearly Herodotus was not quite satisfied as to the value of racial types in anthropology. And there were several reasons for this. On the one hand, the Greeks themselves held family tradition to be good evidence of common descent; and as a matter of fact, the professional genealogist had been beforehand with the anthropologist at nearly all points within the Greek-speaking world. Traditions of common descent, in fact, were too deeply fixed already in popular belief, and involved too many practical questions, such as the rights to real property, or to political privilege, to be treated as anything but valid evidence of kinship. Consequently a people’s own account of their origin, or whatever story was accepted as such, was held to be evidence of a high order. Such price did Greek science pay for the actual solidarity of Greek phylic institutions.

For example, the Sigynnae of the Middle Danube ‘say that they are a colony of Medes. How they have come to be a colony of Medes, I for my part cannot say for certain: yet anything might happen if you give it long enough’.[101] Herodotus is prepared, that is, to allow infinite time to accomplish an almost impossible migration, rather than give up what he accepts as a people’s own account of their origin. But obviously this principle of ethnography was likely to lead to great difficulties. The Sigynnae, it is true, wore ‘Median dress’, presumably trousers of some kind, and perhaps a shaped cap with ear-guards, no less suitable to a Danubian than to a Median winter. But what of their physique? In this instance Herodotus gives no details; but clearly if conflict were to occur between the evidence for descent and for physique--if, that is, a people claimed descent from another people of a different physical type--it might be the difference of physique which would stand in need of explanation.

There was another reason, besides, why traditions of common descent should seem to deserve tender treatment, even when geographical probability was against them. The whole Eastern Mediterranean was still but imperfectly recovering itself after one of those periods of prolonged and intense ethnic stress to which it is exposed by the permeability of its northern frontier. From Thrace to Crete there were fragmentary patches of Pelasgians; Phrygians from Macedon to Peloponnese, far up the Adriatic, and in Western Sicily; Thracians in Naxos and Attica; and Lydians at Askalon. The Ionian merchant, like the Venetian of a later time, found everywhere before him the tracks of the crusading Achaean. The Dorian Spartan in Cyprus, at Soli and Kerynia, found Kurion already the colony of an earlier Argos; at Tarentum he merely filled a vacant niche in an Achaean, almost a Homeric Italy. If things like these could happen within four or five hundred years, γένοιτο δ’ ἂν πᾶν ἐν τῷ μακρῷ χρόνῷ. Outside the Greek world it was the same. Where Sesostris had been, the Scythian and Kimmerian had followed, leaving their trail at Sinope and Askalon, as he in Colchis. Nebuchadnezzar had set the Jews by the waters of Babylon. Darius was but following the rule when he moved Paeonians to Asia Minor, and transplanted Eretrians to Ardericca.

There was another reason also why racial type should be held liable to easy change. The Greeks themselves, and most of their neighbours, were mongrel peoples, for reasons which we have just seen; and there is no doubt that climate and mode of life were actually resulting in ruthless and rapid elimination of intrusive types, wherever these were intolerant of Mediterranean conditions. Now in most of the states of Ionia the blood of the citizens was mixed beyond hope of disentanglement, even by family tradition; for family tradition, as Professor Murray has shown us,[102] was for the most part shattered in the migrations. Yet the external conditions were the same for all; and men saw their blonder kinsmen and townsmen fade and cease out of the land, without fully realizing that what needed explanation was not their failure to survive, but their presence in those latitudes at all. The result, for ethnology, was to encourage a belief that mankind in itself was a pure-bred species, one and indivisible like any other natural kind; and that the marked variations between white and black, straight-haired and woolly-haired peoples, were exclusively the result of climatic, if not human, selection.

Yet another consideration drove men’s thoughts inevitably in the same connexion. One of the best inheritances of Greece from the Minoan world was an elaborate apparatus of cultivated plants and animals: our evidence from dogs, and olive-kernels, begins, I think, to justify this view.[103] And in so minutely subdivided a region, special breeds of local origin were bound to result at an early phase of industry; and to be compared and discussed in the markets and on the quays. Every one knew, in fact, that domesticated animals and plants, under human direction, were tolerant of almost infinite and very rapid alteration: and Man himself is the most highly domesticated of all. It is no wonder then that in the fourth century Socrates is represented as arguing habitually as if Man were a domesticated animal, whose breed could be improved at will, and in any direction, physical or psychological. For even psychological breeding had long been reduced to an art, both with horses and with dogs.

Demonstrable migrations of men, therefore, and demonstrable mutations both of men and of animals, offered evidence of a kind which it was difficult to overlook, that natural characters were variable, and also that acquired ones could become hereditary. It was, in fact, not because the Greeks knew so little, but because on certain crucial points they already knew so much, that they formed the views they did as to the instability of human varieties. How far these views were pressed to their conclusions will be seen best, I think, from a glance at the teaching of Hippocrates, which we may safely take to be near the highwater-mark of fifth-century thought on immediately pre-Socratic lines.

A good example of the doctrine of Hippocrates is contained in his anthropology of the Phasis valley, a region which falls sufficiently within the same limits as the Colchis of Herodotus to be worth comparing with his description of the Colchians. Indeed there is some reason to believe that, for reasons both of geographical theory and of popular ideas of utility, this corner of Hither Asia was attracting a good deal of learned attention from the physicists of Greece. This is what Hippocrates[104] has to say about the Phasis and its people. ‘That country is marshy and warm and well watered and thickly clothed with vegetation, and there is heavy and violent rainfall there at all seasons, and the habitat of its men is in the marshes, and their houses are of wood and rushes ingeniously erected in the water, and they do but little walking to and from town and market, but they sail to and fro in dug-out canoes. For there are numerous artificial canals. The waters they drink are warm and stagnant and putrefied by the sun, and replenished by the rains. The Phasis itself too is the most stagnant of all rivers, and of the gentlest current. And the fruits which grow there are all unwholesome, for they are effeminated [he is thinking of the abundance of fleshy pulpy fruit, like the stone fruits--plums, apricots, and nectarines--which were characteristic of this region in antiquity] and flabby by reason of the abundance of water. And that is why they do not ripen fully. And much mist envelops the country as a result of the water. For just these reasons the Phasians have their bodily forms different from those of all other men. For in stature they are tall, in breadth they are excessively broad, and no joint or vein is to be seen upon them. Their complexion is yellow as if they had the jaundice. Their voice is the deepest of all men’s, because their atmosphere is not clear but foggy and moist. And for bodily exertion they are naturally somewhat disinclined.’

Here we see an unqualified doctrine of the plasticity of human nature, physical and mental, under the influence of climate and geographical environment, such as his description of the Scythians has led us to suspect already. An adjacent passage adds the further theoretical point, that even acquired variations of wholly artificial character may become hereditary in time. The case is that of the Macrocephali, whose haunts unfortunately are not specified.[105] ‘In the beginning it was their custom which was chiefly responsible for the length of their head, but now, their mode of growth too reinforces their custom. For they regard as best bred those who have the longest head.’ Then he describes how the heads are remodelled in infancy by massage and bandaging; and proceeds: ‘At the beginning the practice itself had the result that their mode of growth was of this kind. But as time went on, it came to be inbred so that their law was no longer compulsory:’ ἐν φύσει ἐγένετο, ὤστε τὸν νόμον μηκέτι ἀναγκάζειν. He then explains that just as baldness and grey eyes and physical deformities are hereditary (for he makes no distinction between natural and acquired varieties), ‘now similarly they do not grow at all as they did before: for the practice has no longer any force, through the people’s own neglect of it.’

The bearing of this passage, and the doctrine which it expounds, on Herodotus’ account of the Colchi, will be obvious at once. Clearly, if the proportions of the head can be affected by artificial pressure, reinforced by social selection of the most successfully deformed--that is to say, of the individuals with the softest skulls; and if, as Hippocrates clearly thought, the colour of the eyes, and presence or absence of hair, were characters of the same order of transmissibility; and if, further, as in the case of the Phasians, skin-colour and bodily proportions resulted from climate and occupation; then clearly it mattered comparatively little to Herodotus whether the Colchians were woolly-haired or not. Woolly hair, like baldness, could be inherited indeed; but it could also be superinduced, like macrocephaly, by assiduous curling, or, as every barber knows, by the subtler influence of atmospheric moisture. It is consequently not only because, as suggested above, there were other woolly-haired people, besides the Egyptians and Colchians who were in question, that Herodotus has recourse to other evidence than that of physique to prove their identity: it is because, for fifth-century anthropology, the evidence of physique itself did not justify conclusions of appreciably higher validity than those which resulted from the comparison of industries or customs.

It will be seen from all this that in questions relating to the evolution of Man, Herodotus exhibits--and shares with the whole thought of his time--precisely the opposite weakness to that of the pioneers of modern anthropology. His mistakes arise, not because he is unable to allow time enough for evolutionary changes, but because he tries to crowd too great an amplitude of change into the liberal allowance of time which he is prepared to grant. Ten thousand years, or even twenty thousand, would be a short allowance, in modern geology, for even so active a river as the Nile to fill up the whole Red Sea; but it is more than double the whole length allotted to ‘geological time’ within the memory of men still living.

It will also be clear how deep was the impression created on the Greek mind by the minor changes of the seasons and of history. The formula of Heracleitus, πάντα ῥεῖ καὶ οὐδὲν μένει, had indeed its application to metaphysic; but its origin was in physical science, as a generalization from experience. It had its negative interest as an implement of sceptical destruction. But it had also a high positive value, for it formulated the present as transitional from the past to the future; it emphasized the kinetic and physiological aspect of nature and of science, which has ever been of so far higher value, in research, as in life, than the static and morphological; it substituted an analysis of processes for classification of the qualities of things.

Now it is to this phase of scientific theory that we must assign the first intrusion into scientific terminology of the twin words φύσις and νόμος; in their primitive sense they denote nothing else than precisely such natural processes in themselves, on the one hand, and man’s formulation of such processes, on the other.

It is the more important to keep in mind this fundamental conception of Greek physical anthropology when we go on to consider either the treatment of the evidence of language and culture, which we find in Herodotus, or the applications of physical classification to the purposes of logic and metaphysic. To take the latter first: a doctrine of the real existence of natural kinds, corresponding each, as Hippocrates would put it, to a process of growth peculiar to itself, was clearly easier to understand, if not to discover and formulate, when the men who were to discuss it were already brought up to regard the animal world, for example, as consisting of a comparatively small number of fundamental types, and the infinite variety of individual and regional forms as the effect of external forces upon them. Each actual example of horse or dog, for example, was to be regarded on the one hand as the embodiment of a true equine or canine nature, which reason might hope to detect and isolate; but on the other, it lay like the god Glaucus, encrusted with accidental qualities, the effects of its exposure to a particular environment. Seen in the light of their pre-Socratic history, as elements in the terminology of a great school of naturalists, the catch-words φύσις, γένος, εἶδος, and συμβεβηκὸς gain something, I think, in significance. In particular, it becomes clearer why the word εἶδος, which continued to be used among the naturalists for the specific outcome of συμβεβηκότα upon a member or members of a γένος, came among the philosophers to supersede the word γἑνος in proportion as the centre of reflective interest shifted from the objective exponent of a φύσις to the subjective standpoint of the philosophic observer.

For Herodotus, meanwhile, language and culture can change under stress of circumstances in just the same way as physique; and therefrom follows the possibility of the transmission of culture. Whether any particular custom was to be regarded as innate in the φύσις of those who practised it, or as their response to the stresses of their present environment, or as the result, whether conformable to the environment or not, of intercourse with another variety of Man, was a question to be settled on the merits of each case. It was, in fact, partly the laxness of interest in such matters which resulted from the prevalent theory, and only partly the admitted incompleteness of the observations, that kept ethnographical speculation in so backward a state as we find it in Herodotus’ time. Until the belief in stronger specific characters could be supplemented by some doctrine of cultural momentum, the conception of progress in civilization was hardly attainable at all. This is where the treatment of Hellenic civilization by Herodotus stands in so marked a contrast with his treatment of the civilizations of Egypt and Outland. Egyptian civilization, like Egypt itself, is the gift of the Nile; the φύσις of an Indian attains its τέλος when he has ridden his camels and rescued his gold; the men are black, or tall, or longlived as the effect of natural causes; and as long as these causes persist, so long will there be Indians or Aethiopians with those qualities. Only in Greece is there mastery of man over nature, and that not because nature is less strong, but because Greek man is strong enough to dominate it.

This is how it comes about that barriers of language and of culture, no less than barriers of descent, are powerless in face of a well-defined γένος with a potent φύσις of its own. Such a γἑνος can add to the number of individuals which compose it. Pelasgians and Lelegians can _become_ Hellenes. For Herodotus, as I have explained more in detail elsewhere, the process of conversion of barbarians to the Hellenic φύσις is not clear: the verbs which he employs, μετέβαλον, μετέμαθον, are intransitive; the general impression which is conveyed is of a kind of spontaneous generation: and the same language is used when τὸ Ἐλληνικόν is described as ἀποσχισθὲν ἀπὸ τοῦ βαρβἀρου, in the earliest phase of all. For Thucydides, on the other hand--as was natural to an Athenian who had seen Atticism triumphant in Hellas--Hellenism is acquired by contact with, and imitation of, the φύσις of a genuine Hellene. Of course this explanation of Pelasgian conversion only pushes the problem itself one stage further back; but it marks a distinct advance in analysis beyond the point reached by Herodotus; and it is an advance in precisely the opposite direction to that in which naturalists like Hippocrates were being led through their greater insistence on the external factors, which were the main subject of their study. Thucydides in fact stands already on the Socratic side of the line. The explanation of the transmissibility of culture is to be sought for him not in physiology, but in psychology--not in spontaneous or coercive adjustment to inexorable nature, but in intercourse with enlightened minds.

Among the many different classes of information which Herodotus inclines to give about foreign peoples, two kinds of data are more insistently recorded than the others. There are the marriage customs, and the principal source of food. These will be admitted to be obvious points to note; but there was a special motive in the fifth century for collecting each of them; and the history of thought in the century which followed allows us to trace this motive forward into a maturer context.

The problem of the status of the sexes in society was not a new one in fourth-century Greece. As far back, indeed, as we can trace social institutions directly at all, society in Greece had been constituted on patriarchal lines. But patriarchal institutions had far less undisputed acceptance in the Greek world than they had for example in Italy. It was not merely that Attic rules of inheritance gave a definite, though at all times secondary, status to the mother’s kindred; or that in Sparta, Thebes, and some other states, the women enjoyed in many respects a social equality with the men which has been explained in more ways than one. An Ionian Greek had only to travel down his own coast as far as Lycia to find men reckoning descent through the mother, or to travel back in imagination to the legendary origins of his own people, to find that their pedigrees went often up, not to a god, but to a woman. Olympian society was the same. The consort of Zeus held a very different position from that of the wife in a patriarchal household; and on the Asiatic shore, at least, the gods themselves were traced back to a Mother, not to a Father, of them all.